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Henry Imler July 31st, 2008
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Henry Imler July 31st, 2008
This is my first post in my series of real women in Paul. This series is inspired and based heavily on “Reading Real Women Through the Undisputed Letters of Paul” as found in Women and Christian Origins. We will be looking at all of the women mentioned by name in the undisputed letters of Paul, which incidentally, are about the only place in the Pauline corpus that women are mentioned by name. The undisputed letters of Paul consist of 1st Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. Since these are the only places where women are mentioned by name in the Pauline corpus, we won’t bother ourselves with the merits of dividing the Pauline corpus into the undisputed, disputed and pastorals, for our focus is on the real women with whom Paul dealt. As such, we will be examining the following historical Christian women in this order: Chloe, Prisca, Euodia and Syntyche, Apphia, Phoebe, and Junia. With these preliminaries out of the way, will will now turn to our first actual woman Paul wrote about : Chloe (part I).
We begin with Chloe because out of all the women on our list, her mention is the briefest. 1 Corinthians 1:11 is all we hear from Paul about Chloe:
For information has been given to me concerning you all, my brothers (and sisters), by those of Chloe that there is strife among you. [1]
Τῶν Χλόης: “those of Chloe” is all we hear from Paul about Chloe. How much can we really say about this woman? More than one might think. We will try to answer three questions: 1) Who were Chloe’s people? 2) Was Chloe a member of the Christian community in Corinth? and 3) If any, what influence did Chloe have in the Christian community at Corinth? We will answer the first question here and deal with the last two in the next post on this topic.
Who were Chloe’s People? The only real attribute we can assign to Chloe is the fact that she had “people.” And we even have to infer that from the text. [2] It is these people who have informed Paul about the strife or discord among the Corinthians. They were most likely members of the Christian community at Corinth. They could have been specially commissioned by Chloe to seek out Paul for the purpose of reporting a community update.
There were four general poles of status in the Roman empire: family status, gender, birth into freedom/slavery, and wealth. Depending on the the values of each resulted in greater or lessor autonomy. For example, slaves of the wealthy, which ran their owner’s household and often their business affairs, lived better and enjoyed a higher status than those who were free, but of poor familial status and were poor. Thus, for these people to be sponsored for travel meant that it is very likely that they were slaves of a person of high class. (We’ll deal with Chloe and her relatively high class in the next post.) What is certain, is that they needed no introduction and were respected within the Corinthian Christian community. This does not mean they were leaders, but they were in high standing.
Even though there is no indication that Chloe’s people were leaders in their community, that does not mean that slaves were not leaders of Christian communities. We have the Roman governor Pliny the Younger asking the emperor Trajan for advice on how to deal with some Christians he had rounded up. The interesting thing for us is that chief among them were two female slaves that served as leaders for the group. [3] The only Christians that Pliny mentions specifically are two female slaves which he terms deaconesses. In dispatches of this nature, it was common only to mention the leaders of the group in question. This is not surprising, given Paul’s incorporation of an early baptism ritual in his letter to the Galatians which declared an abandonment of gender, class, and race as status markers upon entrance into the Christian community. [4]
Later interpreters of Paul would advise slaves to accept their Roman class status and to lay low in their real-world freedom for the sake of keeping the Romans off their backs. [5] If there was anything the Romans hated, it was a disruption of the status quo. This is why private associations were so dangerous. The Romans thought that anything done in private was meant for political subversion and upheaval – why else would they be meeting in private? So strong was this thinking, the emperor Trajan let a city burn down instead of allowing Pliny the Younger to fund a fire brigade. Let that soak in for a second – the Romans would rather let a perfectly good city to burn to the ground than allow firefighters have an association!
All official mention of Christianity by the Roman governmental officials indicates that they were seen as either a voluntary association or burial society. For a slaves to start proclaiming that they were free (politically, not just metaphorically) by virtue of their religion would only invite the wrath of the Roman government upon the Christians.
Back to Chloe’s people. While we don’t know a whole lot about them, they were likely prominent members of the Christian community at Corinth and slaves of a wealthy woman. They were most likely not leaders in the community, but they did seem to carry some influence. Additionally, we see that by the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, there were (female) leaders of Christian communities who were slaves.
What does this mean for us, as American Christians living in a situation where there are no slaves? Firstly, we see a early Christian opposition to slavery, but an subsequent drive to not rock the boat in the Roman empire. There is a contradiction here: at once there is a delegitimization of slavery [6] and a impetus to begrudgingly accept this ungodly institution for the sake of the Kingdom of God. I don’t like this, but it is there. It is there as a survival strategy, not because God was down with slavery. Violence is discouraged as a means for obtaining political freedom. The lesson that we can learn today is that we Christians should not accept the evils of this world, but work against them especially now that we are politically free. Additionally and most importantly, we should concern ourselves with Christian witness to others above all.
The next post in the series will look at Chloe herself. Stay tuned!
Henry Imler July 30th, 2008
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Henry Imler July 29th, 2008
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Henry Imler July 29th, 2008
Firefly is on Hulu. This is how my lappy is set up:
Thesis chapter three rough draft on which I am working is on the left, with endnote chumming along in the lower-right corner topped off with the pilot episode of Firefly on top of it. Good times.
Henry Imler July 29th, 2008
Damn Dirty Skrulls: What We Know Now, 9 via Newsarama.com – Comics – Nice lil summary.
Ezekiel in a Few Words via Think Wink. by Hank
Best. Batman. Ever. via I am Kyle’s self-indulgence by Kyle – My thoughts exactly, albeit in better words than I would care to craft.
The Dark Knight — A Philosophical Review via Christus Victor Ministries » Greg Boyd (Gregory A. Boyd) by gregboyd – This is good on two levels. One, it is a nice talk about the relationship between Harvey, Batman, and the Joker (though it would have be bolstered if he had included how Gordon fits in there). Two, well, let’s just say that Boyd called Harvey the “chief commissioner” and there was mention (before the edits) of Keith Ledger.
Pre-Fall Patriarchy Revisited: A Structural Analysis of Genesis 1:26-28 via Theology for the Masses by tom – good stuff here. Patriarchy is the result of the fall, not egalitarianism.
Southern Baptist Scholar Links Spouse Abuse to Wives’ Refusal to Submit to Their Husbands – Damn it, damn it, damn it! Question – why is scholar not in quotes?
Henry Imler July 28th, 2008
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Henry Imler July 28th, 2008
There are a few things that I left off of that list o’ lusts the other day.
1. A moleskine journal/notebook – Such high quality…. but I really don’t have that need. I have a notebook that is working just fine right now. I told myself that when I fill the other 58% of it up, then I will get a moleskine.
2. A good set of commentaries. As I was telling Scott and Steven today and JR yesterday, I don’t have a reliable place to go for bible book commentaries. What’s too fundie? What’s to glib and lib? I just don’t know. I fancy myself a moderate to conservative on the scholarly and theological scale, so I often feel stuck in no-man’s land. (know of any slash wanna get rid of some to save space?????)
3. For Jake, Tiff, Jake, and Dawn to not move away… ever. (Nor Scott and Sarah next year… nor Meredith and I the year or two following that.)
Henry Imler July 28th, 2008
My friend, who is departing for Africa in a few weeks to get his masters in linguistics, is always commenting on the geekyness of our circle of friends. Today, I took another step in demonstrating the truth value of his comments. The following is part of an IM conversation that I had with my little brother:
me: hey
Grant: hey
me: you have thine xbox yet?
Grant: not yet
me: cool
I just sold my old one to my friend Jake
Grant: no wait i do have my xbox just no live yet
me: gotcha
Grant: you confused me with the language
me: just pullin a 616 thor
Grant: i got ya
Henry Imler July 27th, 2008
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Henry Imler July 26th, 2008
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Henry Imler July 26th, 2008
Here is my list of things I am lusting after this month. I list them here so I can get them out of my head.
Item 1: The Coffee Table Bed
I would love to have this in an office in front of a futon. Its a great way to mold an office into a spare bedroom without devoting that room 100% to one. Any wood-working skills wanna make me one? At $900 a pop, this one is pretty expensive.
Item 2: Atom-Based EEE PC
Over at NewEgg they have the EEE Laptop with Intel’s new Atom processor and a 40GB solid state hard drive. I crave this. Throw on som ‘buntu and have a nice lil guy to carry around and… well, do the same stuff I do with my 14.4 HP dv2500. At $700 a pop, it would be better to go HP or something and get much more bang for your buck. If this was around 300, I’d think about it much more. But the idea of a little laptop that I can carry like a book is appealing for me. I still say I need one for a month. Then I would tire of the idea.
Item Three: A Finished Masters Degree
It is so, so hard not to look past this year and into the next now that it is soooo close. The next phase of my education/career is exciting for me. By the way, what is that dude talking about in the pic? Thesis is going well this summer and I have 15 hours more than I need to graduate. While I love being in graduate school here at MU, I wanna take the next step towards teaching my own classes somewhere.
Item Four Mo’ Comic Books!
Yeah, this one is a doosey. I want to buy Ultimates Volume II, I wanna collect Ultimate Spiderman, Y: The Last Man, etc… Out of all the lusts, it is the cheapest and easiest to obtain. But they add up.
Item Five: A cheap house
This one is pretty self-explanatory. Issues – we might be in Columbia through the summer of ‘09 or the summer of ‘11. Also, Meredith and I are liking the idea of group-living. Nothing commune-like, just sharing the costs and sharing the fellowship. Buying a house is tricky there. How to split the costs? Economic trust is hard for me. Darn hard. I don’t move on something unless I am sure – and its hard to be sure. I like the idea of living in community as annoyed as I am with that term (when I hear pop-terms a lot, I annoy quickly, but this does not devalue the contents of the term). In our planning session today, Meredith and I saw that in the coming year we are going to be faced with i) staying where we are at, ii) buying a house alone, iii) finding lower rent alone, iv) buying a house together, v) buying a house and renting part of it out, or vi) renting a house together with some people in our community. But, there are a multitude of issues swirling around this, not the least of which is economic and spatial pressures surrounding family planning issues.
Henry Imler July 25th, 2008
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Henry Imler July 24th, 2008
Played Ticket to Ride on XBL with Jake - fun times, hope to get Dawn and Meredith on there as well. Q, Grant? We should do it sometime - or play Halo 3 campaign sometime as well. Brendo - what are you playing?
Ultimate Spiderman 123 marks the return of Venom and I gotta say - it was a masterful telling of what has been going on with Eddie/Venom since he was defeated and disappeared all those issues ago. It is here where that three panel shot took place - and, by the way, the way they did that was great. I heart you Bendis; like a good lil’ comic reader.
Red Hulk? One of the dumbest things I have ever read. Best line besides the whole of this review? "I haven’t read Incredible Hulk in a while, because it was so Incredibly Bad."
Getting up at six tomorrow to squeeze in some work before I help the Parsons with their move and have my nice Jazz and Dark Knight date with Meredith tomorrow.
Henry Imler July 24th, 2008
Basketawful :: 2007-08 NBA Worsties: Part 5 – In part five of their ongoing series on the worst and most hilarious of the NBA last season. Lots of youtube clips of absolutely hilarious stuff, such as Kobe nailing an old woman with a towel and Dirk bringing out the “Short-Bus” slam among others. If you are a basketball fan and don’t mind some crude humor at times, I highly recommend checking out this post, series, and blog.
Popular Science :: Why is it So Hard to Wake Up in the Morning? – So I shouldn’t sleep in on the weekends? Darn.
New Scientist :: Magnetic Slingshot Creates Aurora on Earth
Get Rich Slowly :: The Dirty Secrets of Debt Reduction (and What to Do About Them) – Whether you are looking to build wealth or use your wealth to empower the powerless, everyone needs to get their money situation in order. J.D., over at Get Rich Slowly talks about what got him into debt in the first place and what he had to do to get out of it. Read this if you are A) in the same boat, B) getting out on your own for the first time, or C) are human.
Henry Imler July 23rd, 2008
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Henry Imler July 23rd, 2008
Now that Firefox 3.0 has been out in the wild for a few weeks, and everyone has adopted it because of its lower memory footprint and time-saving new features, here are some ways to spruce up your browsing experience.
1. Fix Google and it’s services :
2. Maximize your browsing space – Ok, you have moved all of your navigation buttons, address bar, and search bar up to the “file” bar and turned off the “navigation bar” to maximize your screen real estate. Here are your next steps:
Tiny Menu – Reduce “File – Edit – View – History – Bookmarks – Tools – Help” to “Menu” 3. Geep on Twiddin on :: TwitterFox – write and receive twids from your browser
4. No. More. Ads. :: Adblock Plus – simple, really – zap those ads.
5. I love thing page, but it needs…
6. There is a research paper due tomorrow - Zotero
Henry Imler July 23rd, 2008
Never use coffee shops to have a group viewing of a promotional DVD. I know that you wanna have a nice place to get together and try to suck some of your fiends into the latest knife-selling scheme, but please, have some respect for the rest of the patrons who are using this shared space to get some work done in a distraction free environment.
The other TA’s are right, I am a grumpy old man!
Henry Imler July 22nd, 2008
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